


cinnabar and wildflowers

by daekie



Category: Heaven Will Be Mine (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/F, Memorial Foundation ending, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 05:52:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16212776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daekie/pseuds/daekie
Summary: It's another country.  A strange country.  But the Earth is too.We can all hold this ending together, if we hold it tight.





	cinnabar and wildflowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RunaLiore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunaLiore/gifts).



> title from _adagio for the coming of age_ by tumblr user [brella](http://brella.tumblr.com/post/68360387860/adagio-for-the-coming-of-age-11282013).

Rising and falling, the two-part world; we’ll keep apart and never touch, your echo behind the frosted glass, our little heaven on a world more docile than you ever made it.  
This ending scares us too, but we can survive this, we can make something beautiful even under the heavy gravity of you.

(We aren’t what we were, of course, but neither are you now that you know we’re here and we’re staying here.   
We won’t forgive Earth for its’ reminders it could have killed us, and Earth won’t ever forgive us for deciding we want our happiness this way.   
They'll never hurt us, harmless as we are, our old bodies torn apart to make the equation work: but they'll never forgive us.  We'll live separate, and never touch.)

What does the sky look like from Earth, now, with the glittering dust of our Ship-Selves like so much cosmic whispering and the Moon so close to you?    
Do you like it, or does the thought of poison in the sky scare you off?

We like it a lot.  

Maybe this isn’t the ending any of us hoped for, but it’s open-ended, and maybe one day you’ll come home to us too.  

And there really will be no one left behind.

* * *

Pluto always believed in a new home for humanity in space.  This isn’t necessarily humanity, small and few as they are; there’s Cradles’ Graces, of course, curled together in perfect harmony with the garden they could never take home.    
The refugees of the Celestial Mechanics, too alien to ever go back to Earth, too human to do the things Iapetus wanted to do with the Gravity Well.

The Moon is covered in gentle lilacs and lilies, the sound of water a pleasant lullaby, and Pluto has used what Gravity she can always command to straighten out the narrative in a way she understands.    
A story where nothing turns out perfectly, but everything turns out acceptably, every hand at a stalemate but impossible to ignore: she will craft a new normal.  
  
Krun Macula had dragged the fabrics of space apart until her reactors had cracked and powdered, and she had touched heaven, and she had held hands with the String of Pearls and Mare Crisium and made a new heaven with all the strength in her.    
This isn’t really heaven, but it’s a good substitute, the kind a human would make because they can’t imagine something truly angelic -- and these aren’t cities, not yet, but they will be.  
These aren’t cultures, not yet, but the Culture they have built is growing gently and slowly.

(Are you ready to spin backwards?  

The orbit is changed, close enough to press fingers against but never touch;  
Krun Macula had wrapped her hands around it and looked at it with her biggest eye, and said,  
_this is what love can do, and this is what we can do, even if it’s all we can do.  
A half-new world for us half-new girls, with only each other, but we will never be alone_.  
   
Mare Crisium had said _Earth is sweet, but memories are always kinder than reality,  
and if all we can do is pretend at a normal then we can make a beautiful normal and maybe we’ll be safe.  
Happiness for all. Let them leave us behind.  
  
_ And the String of Pearls had smiled, tail lashing with excitement, and she had said _who says things have to be this way?  
Who says things have to be _ that _way?_  
_There is no binary system in space.  Human culture can’t touch the blackness between stars._  
_We can build whatever we want, as little or as much as we want,  
and it’ll be our home and they can’t touch it._  
_We can be human like this._

 _  
And I want to be human like this._  
_  
It’s the only way I can stand it._  
  
_With you._

And something else had said _do you want to make a world of our own_ , like every reactor humming in unity, like every heart beating in unison,  
and we had reached in and changed that one pale decimal point and hoped it would give us a pale pretense of a world --  
and pulled at that one little change until our bodies broke and we couldn’t survive alone in space any longer --

And we said yes.  Why wouldn’t we?  
This is a world we didn’t know could be, but this is a life we never knew we could have.  
None of us have ever been taught to be gentle like this. To be civilian.  
We’re feeling it out blindly, with our flowers and our brilliantly red sky, because we can never reach again what we left behind.

Left to its own devices, the Gravity Well let us touch it and tell it what we wanted even if it could have done nothing but remake us instead,  
and it read off everything humans have ever made in space and we told it we’re okay if it’s only playing pretend.)

What’s left of the Memorial Foundation had gone planetside, almost-gently, with one last transmission of _we cannot bring you back, but we will not vilify you_ ; Luna-Terra had felt it was only fair, probably, given that she’d betrayed them.  Maybe not betrayed. (It had definitely been some kind of breaking of trust. Calling it a betrayal is kind of ugly, but then again, Luna-Terra doesn’t like ugly truths even if she prefers them.)  Maybe it had been what someone wanted, but that someone hadn’t been Halimede; she could still see the princess’ soft face, screaming over the comms --

It’d worked out in the end, mostly, but Halimede had never had any forgiveness for her in the first place.  There was no bridge of trust to build on and to fix. Lo Sulci had been as glass, as a prism, every ray and wave of the Gravity Well unbound and spilling out through her hands as she tried to grasp them; no, there had never been any trust left over, but there was less than none after that.  What did you say to someone after you’d done that to them, left to create your own ending with two other girls impossibly like you and unlike you, in a way she could never hope to be? The invitation had been extended, unspoken, and Memorial Foundation had said _no._ Had said _we can’t be this with you_.   _We have to go home._ (Well, Halimede had told her to go live on the Moon and away from her forever, but Europa had been more diplomatic about it.)

* * *

She wakes inevitably early on lazy summer mornings, these days, and pulls herself out of the inevitable tangle Pluto and Saturn make; Pluto always runs too warm and Saturn runs too cold, and half the time the blankets are thrown halfway across the room when she wakes up, or Saturn’s stolen all of them and Luna-Terra’s legs are bare, or even that she’s somehow ended up being the little spoon for both of them (again).  The air conditioning does its’ best, but she still sweats. All of them do, in this created summer.

Except Pluto’s already up today, too, so she’s only trapped on one side.  Saturn whines a little, squirms a little, but in the end she’s still asleep and lets Luna-Terra out without any complaint.  Luna-Terra ruffles her hair so that it sticks up a little and swings her legs off the bed.

Pluto’s already in the kitchen, making pancakes; she smiles like she’s got a secret.  Looks like strawberries at the stove -- oh, Saturn’s going to be happy about that one. There's already a pot of coffee ready, a basket of jasmine flowers on the windowsill for scent overpowered by it; she pours two mugs (and then a third, at Pluto’s protest of _Luna-T!!!_ ), seasons one of them with obscene amounts of sugar and pours a little milk in the second, and leaves the third cup black.  

Pluto likes her coffee black.  Saturn and Luna-Terra can’t pretend to understand it, but Saturn has the ability to burn water, so she doesn’t get to pass any judgement on anyone else’s coffee after setting off a smoke alarm _twice_ in the same attempt.

(Luna-Terra’s a decent cook, they’ve discovered, but Pluto’s a better baker.  It’s these little domestic things they’re all finding out about themselves, without war at the forefront of their minds, without awful rations and battle commands.)

They’ll go get the ingredients for lunch, soon, and dinner too; but there’s no light today, and won’t be for the rest of the month.  All their brightness is artificial. The Sun’s light is as impossible for them today as seeing it from the thin atmosphere is, as impossible as watching the axis of the planets turn now is.  Sometimes she forgets, even still, that she’s the size she is and not controlling something else impossibly bigger.

“Do you miss it,” she says, and she can feel Pluto’s pout even without having to see it.  

“Of course I do!  I miss a lot of it.  I miss being so big everyone was scared of me!”  She turns, though, and she’s smiling. “But this is okay, too.  I’m happy with the two of you. I’m happy you found something you believed in, Luna-T, and something we believe in too.”

And that’s enough, on some level.  That’s enough. Pluto believes in this ending she couldn’t hold, and Saturn believes in this ending she muddled and muddied her way through, but they stole it from Lo Sulci and they broke the Gravity Well down to nothing to hold this impossible promise of life in space.

Of love in space.

 

(Days are long, here.  And so are nights.  
And the atmosphere is a little thin; it might be that way for hundreds of years.  
  
But we don’t think so.  
Every day we live here, our culture settles into the ground, into the air, into the buildings we’ve made.

We don’t need to _be_ anyone or anything.  
We don’t need to be Celestial Mechanics’ reserve pilot,  
Cradles’ Graces’ princess,  
Memorial Foundation’s ace.   
  
We can settle into the skins we've always been told were intermediate.

Maybe someday some of you will come, those of you that could never retire your bodies forever,  
those of you who could never give up the promise of what we were supposed to have.

We’ve got rooms for you, too.  
You don’t have to explain yourself or why you want this, or what you think of us.

Just think about the scent of lilacs.  It’ll be okay.  
We can all hold this future of life in space together.

 

Hold it tight.)


End file.
